Breath-hold balanced-Steady-State Free Precession (b-“SSFP”) cine imaging can be considered the gold standard for evaluating myocardial function in MRI. (See, e.g., Reference 1). However, the performance of breath-hold cine MRI can be degraded in patients with impaired breath-hold capability, due to failure to synchronize cardiac cycles at different respiratory states. In order to minimize the influence from respiration, a deformable registration framework has been incorporated into reconstruction for respiratory motion correction (see, e.g., References 2 and 3); however it ran the risk of introducing spatial blurring due to interpolation errors. Real-time cine MRI procedure is an alternative which can facilitate free-breathing imaging at the expense of lower spatial resolution (see, e.g., Reference 4). Compressed sensing techniques exploiting temporal sparsity have enabled higher spatiotemporal resolutions for real-time cine MRI. (See, e.g., Reference 5). However, the superposition of respiratory and cardiac motion limits temporal sparsity.
Evaluation of myocardial function with MRI can be challenging in patients with arrhythmias, such as premature ventricular contractions (“PVCs”) or atrial fibrillation, due to the difficulty of synchronizing disparate cardiac cycles. In order to achieve adequate image quality in these patients, the electrocardiogram (“ECG”) signal can usually be monitored such that the “ectopic” cardiac cycles can be discarded before image synchronization and reconstruction. However, those discarded “ectopic” cardiac cycles could potentially provide clinically useful information for specific cardiac diseases. For example, it is known that the premature ventricular contractions in PVC patients have a different pattern than the normal ventricular contractions. Therefore it can be clinically useful if both “normal” and “ectopic” cardiac cycles can be reconstructed for clinical use. The application of compressed sensing to real-time cine imaging can be a promising tool to enable free-breathing real-time cine imaging with adequate spatiotemporal resolution on patients with impaired breath-hold capabilities or arrhythmias. (See, e.g., References 10 and 11). However, conventional temporal compressed sensing does not account for respiratory motion or arrhythmias, and thus only moderate performance can be achieved in these cases.
Thus, it may be beneficial to provide an exemplary system, method and computer-accessible medium for rapid real-time cardiac MRI that can address and/or overcome at least some of the deficiencies described herein above.